दो इंच का Bend और मीलों की दूरी

Do you love trains? Because they are one of the most fascinating man-made things for me. And not just for their graciousness in carrying us through most geographical marvels (they make me love India so), or the magical ability of the mind to think up new metaphors every time you let go and stare long enough as the tracks course along joint-by-joint to places where stereotypes dwell even as your thoughts memory-by-memory reach a new understanding. I enjoy them especially for their culture. Every place has a culture: dynamic as made by the people there but also inherently unique. The few times I have been on a plane I have only been most glad getting out of the airport. Planes make me claustrophobic and every one seems to be in transit, just waiting to get where they are going and then start living again. May be it is only because I have been on short flights and longer ones must require some settling down. But, I hope to do all my travelling by train no matter where; station-to-station, wheeler-to-wheeler because life goes on even in stopovers…

Any way, my post today is a hark back to the past 4 years of weekly train journeys through the absolutely-lush-right-now Sahyadris. Being a suburban and staying in Bombay all years through had me well-bred in trains. Then good things happened and I got the chance to move out to study at 18. 4 hours is not very far, but it is far enough. Now in less than a year I am going to be back home entirely, and as I returned this time I found my self thinking of the incidents that every ride bore with itself. There is so much I learned from the first time I travelled alone with a reserved seat to when I got a sympathy seat for appearing tired after being up all night before a university practical to when feigning ignorance and my college ID card got me to travel on a long-distance train with a short-distance pass. I am reaching that stage in life where being a woman and being a doctor are preceding who ‘I’ am. May be they always did only I am now aware of it. But I have also learned that they can be effective shields and sharp screening tests.

The journeys have lent themselves to characters. Sakshi, the 7 year old, whose 4 year old sister ‘lai bhav khaate’, and who travels alone every day to a school 3 stations away and chats up any ‘tai’ to her fancy by asking her the time.

The man with protruding eyes and hoarse voice who must have not been more than 35, and selling pencils with pink tassels as if he were selling his soul; he might have been because he was also cachexic, sweating profusely and between tirades to the women in the crowded Karjat local on the upkeep and features of the pencils, he had to twice stop and wait for his breath to catch up. But what made me notice him was how he was dressed in a remotely ironed shirt and a pair of trousers held up by a belt. And I remembered as a child swinging my mother’s dupatta over my shoulders and trotting around the house with her work-bag on my arm telling imaginary people I was going to work. I imagined the pencil-seller similarly ironing his clothes and wearing his belt to actually go to work.

Then there was the kid, not more than 10 years in age who chatted up my classmate to get his shoes polished by him, but the classmate was wearing Floaters that don’t need any polishing, still the kid hung around. He said he was hungry, so the classmate gave him a 5 rupee coin to buy a VadaPav. The kid quickly pocketed it. We asked why. He simply said he’d give it to his mother but not to his father because he was often drunk. Then Dadar came and we went our ways.

Climbing up the stairs at Dadar I often had to turn my music off to let me hear the man that played a bansuri that sustained it self above the drone of announcements and shuffling feet and talking people.

The early morning Ladies’ Compartment sleepy rides have had their share of intrigue as things involving women often do. My first train-fight was fought here. An obvious rookie to travelling alone or in trains demanded I get up from my seat for her. On asking why she suddenly yelled to the window of the yet stationary train “Mum! She is not giving me my seat!” Thus, my rite of passage.

There was once a woman who began chatting up her neighbour and subtly plugged the travel agency she ran. Every mountain, waterfall and slight mention of weather would cause her to segue into raptures of the tour she conducted of a place with similar but trumped up features. Time and again she would say that her family was financially very well-placed and their agency was therefore awesomeness-at-unbelievably-low-prices. But by her manner she struck me as desperate. I wondered wheather she was phoney or I was judgemental.

The most distracting co-passengers have to be the clan of Iranians that got in one day at Karjat. They were loud, they were gossiping, they were obtrusive, and it was hilarious how much like any other group of women they were but because they spoke Farsi no one knew what to make of them. And because the littlest one wanted the window seat I was occupying, she tried to bribe me by singing a Farsi song mostly I think because she saw me listening to songs through my ear-phones. It is much fun matching wits with kids.

Songs have been such a constant through the years. Sitting at the door way, standing while trying to not think of the discomfort of the leering eyes, or just sitting by the emergency window which has no bars, songs and their words are tied like ribbons to the familiar trees, shapes in mountains, orange and pink temple tops, lone houses amidst vast stretches of paddy fields and the one boy of the many that stop and wave, that I spontaneously waved back to.

The mountains made me realise that I could jump between them any time and die with out regret. The mountains that change colour and mood with season and question my questioning why I should not feel in a particular manner just because of the weather. The mountains that always come back to being green and fiercely private in the rains. The mountains that stretch languidly across the horizon while the train snakes in and out of tunnels like in a game of twisted hide-n-seek. The tunnels that make boys hoot without fail. The men that play cards and fold at every station like they must turn off the sinful thoughts before entering temples. The man who sells chai-coffee mix, chai-bournvita mix, coffee-bournvita mix and even plain milk. The will to resist VadaPav at Karjat. The man selling half-bad roasted peanuts at Kalyan which you eat half of any way because suddenly you don’t want to eat any more.

And the games one plays! Red Hands when there were many. Then Antakshari even when you didn’t want to but no one else was getting that song from ‘Ae’. Then the senior boys that came trouping under the wings of the girls from their class because where else would they get a better chance to acquaint themselves with the Bombay chicks and those that stayed in propah Bombay and those that stayed in Kandivali or Thane or Dombivili. And what their parents did. Only introductions, we are not ragging you or any thing.

The creepy guy that stood at the door and gladdened his eyes so much that we had to change seats. He then turned out to be our Pathology Demonstrator next year. The random guys that may or may not have been surreptiously taking pictures of girls on their phones, who none the less got ample doses of misplaced Feminism. Peek-a-boo with cute guys. The changing definition of cute.

The old man that wouldn’t quit talking about why he mistook us for Americans, his sons in the USA and his Diabetic Foot.

The first train ride was with new bosom buddies. Then we formed society and withdrew our borders and ‘caught’ our places. The anger that I couldn’t shake off of riding home alone and the frustration that I now try to befriend on having company.

Changing trains in the middle of some where. The smell of ‘home’ as we entered Kalyan. The two trains missed. The one caught running. And the thoughts, ideas, and pasts I forgot on all of them.